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Interview : Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal,Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator atInformation Architected, Inc.
Hello everybody !Today let's go to USA.
Remember : The subjects I focused on for these interviews are1. To introduce men and women playing a role in ECM environment 2. To discover the ECM community3. To explore ECM Solutions4. To learn more about technologies and content management practices.
Today, I have the great oppportunity to interview
Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal,Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator at Information Architected, Inc. and a long-timeplayer in the ECM world.Hello Dan !
First of all, let me thank you for the time you take to make this interview reality.
Certainly, my pleasure to be involved.
So Dan, you have a lot of roles and titles. But among all of that, what's your favouriteone and why ?
Ah, so difficult to chose only one - but if I were to choose one aspect of my workinglife that drives me the most, it would be as an educator.Regardless of the work I'm engaged in at any particular time, I always strive to belearning for my own ongoing improvement, and to make sure that when I'm consulting,writing, blogging, presenting, that I'm helping to educate others, and most importantly, to getothers to a spark questions that THEY should be tackling to further their education andawareness of the topic at hand.My belief is that unless you are continuously learning, you are only going to fallfarther and farther behind what is possible in this world - and who can afford to do that?
In December 2008, you have founded Information Architected, Inc. What's the purposeof this entity? Could you describe it ?
Sure, Information Architected is a phrase that is meant to flip conversations aroundfrom their typical TECHNOLOGY focus - such as "we need a wiki!" - to the business goalsthat need to be accomplished, such as needing to rapidly assemble a distributed project teamin a professional services firm. Deciding what tool is appropriate comes AFTER the businessneed, not before.This becomes a flexible question that can help people get to the root of what they'relooking to do.
Interview : Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal,Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator atInformation Architected, Inc.
What is YOUR Information Architected for?To increase sales? To reduce customer support calls? To engage your customers inconversations? To move faster than your competition? None of that happens by accident, andunless the technologies you put in place to SOLVE those problems is put together, purposefully, to create the end result, it will be far more difficult to guarantee that result.If you run the question out a bit further, it becomes, for example, Is your informationarchitected for collaboration? with your customers? to co-create new products? in a "crowd-sourced" social community? And how does that system connect to any other systems thatmight be "behind the firewall?" How does compliance factor into this? How many languagesneed to be handled? Is access necessary via mobile?People don't want more tools, they want to solve their problems, but all too often,technology leads the discussion, causing serious limitations in the ways that organizations arethinking about how to solve their business problems. It seems trivial, but it's a battle foughtevery day in the business world, and frequently, lost.
What's your work day after day ?
Ah, the life of a startup! The glamorous side is over-rated, for those who haven't triedit. Fortunately, between the background of my partner, long-time colleague Carl Frappaolo,who had started two companies prior to this, and myself, with a varied background includingmarketing and hands-on development, we don't have to spend much time in running thedetails of the business. The great benefit of starting up a company these days is that nearlyevery service we need can easily be bought and activated in a matter of minutes, for example,our website was literally up and running with branding and initial content, in a matter of hours.Which of course, in this economy, allows us to not focus on the plumbing of the business, and instead identify and serve clients. I have to say, as a former day-to-day IT guy,running racks of servers, this is quite a refreshing change! As I've said for a long time, evenwhen I was a day-to-day IT guy coding and fixing, the less you have to do to get your technology to do your work, the more you can focus on whatever your business ACTUALLYdoes - creating new drugs, more fuel efficient cars, etc.. When technology becomes a burden, plain and simple, you're doing IT wrong.The client-facing work varies - providing strategic consulting, at this point, most oftenon decreasing costs of operations, and increasing delivering value to customers more quicklyand effectively through collaboration, keynoting and presenting at various conferences andevents, rewriting and delivering the 2009 edition of AIIM's 4-day ECM Course - including afocus on MIKE2 (an open source methodology for ECM implementation which I've becomeintimately familiar with over the last year), creating some of the newest and deepestSharePoint research available on the web as of this writing, and more.
Interview : Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal,Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator atInformation Architected, Inc.
More succinctly, we provide Analysis, Consulting and Education - or you could think of us as ACEs for short. ;)Analysis feeds our Consulting work, which is frequently part Education as we work at"teaching a man to fish" rather than stay on site for months, and the entire set of offeringsloops back around to refresh itself with each engagement.If you are not aware of what ECM can do for you, you've been sold a bill of goods thatdidn't deliver - by a solution provider or integrator, are looking to improve HOW you're usingyour current investment, or looking to replace all or some portion of your ECM environment -we can drop into your environment, assess this situation, and provide pointed guidance onhow to quickly start making progress, whether towards a long-term or short-term strategy.
I visited your site : http://www.informationarchitected.com/ and It's the first time Ifound the term Innovation Management. Could you explain this term and the link withcontent management ?
Innovation Management is a relatively new term - the basic premise is that"Innovation" is not magic, it shouldn't be accidental, and if organizations are going to succeedat any point, and specifically NOW, in this economy, then innovation needs to be addressedand managed, in order to actually make it happen at all, let alone consistently.The tie to ECM is that the process of innovation management can be greatly improved by layering many of the core components of ECM. For instance, the "front end" of innovation, where as many ideas as possible are generated, are generated and feed into some place where it is "captured" - just as a form, contract, or other piece of content would. Thatfront-end is then moved through a process or workflow, to allow others in the organization tocollaborate around improving, validating or dropping the idea. The actual implementation of the idea, if it makes it this far, could shoot into another process, perhaps separate from theECM system, such as to set a new automobile design into motion. By capturing this entire process in an electronic system, it can be thoroughly tracked, made visible to all who are participating in that process, and undestood how long it takes to bring a new idea to market,who is best at this, and so on.This is fairly cutting edge, although the core concepts that support innovationmanagement are not new. My interest in this topic began when I was working in theInnovation Lab of Perot Systems about 4 years ago. It's a fascinating area, and an area thatorganizations need significant help in seeing how it is possible to manage innovation in asystematic way.
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